Nicola Benedetti interview: 'Concert halls aren't filled by being pretty — it’s about the totality of what someone brings'

Your dream music teacher: Violinist Nicola Benedetti has launched a foundation to help children get into music
Andy Gotts
Melanie McDonagh7 January 2020

If you had a fantasy music teacher it’d have to be Nicola Benedetti.

She’s that fabulous cocktail of technical brilliance, kindness, no-nonsense realism (“It’s a fantasy that anyone can play the violin”), unselfconscious beauty and commitment to the life-changing potential of well-taught music that makes for a brilliant teacher as well as a stellar concert violinist. She has two strings to her bow (the bow in question belonging to her own Stradivarius): performing and teaching. “I find it very easy working with children,” she says cheerfully. “It’s huge fun. I’m not scared of telling them off.”

And this weekend she’ll be hosting workshops at the Southbank Centre as part of the newly launched Benedetti Foundation, a nationwide initiative that aims to transform the teaching of music — “this visceral, life-changing thing” — by disseminating the best practice through weekend workshops (there are six in the UK this year).

Each involves a sessions for teachers and children on stringed instruments, orchestra and, crucially, on general musicianship. It’s an opportunity to have a celebrity tutor for next to nothing (although for practical reasons she won’t be teaching every workshop) where Benedetti can share what she’s seen done well. Two-thirds of the participants at the London sessions are from state schools, drawn from 30 boroughs — “I’m really proud of how broad our attendance is.” Or you could try her YouTube videos, With Nicky.

She takes inclusivity as a given; she’s sensitive, for instance, to the difficulties some Muslim communities have with teaching music (some conservative groups think it’s un-Islamic) and insists that there’s something in every religious heritage that can provide a common ground with other musical traditions.

Music, for her, is a way of surmounting divisions. If that sounds a bit like Beethoven’s Ode To Joy, no wonder: he, along with Shostakovich, is her favourite composer. But she’s not a fan of, say, adults pushing black children towards rap or hip hop purely on the basis that it’s part of their culture. “I have issues,” she says carefully, “with certain levels of profanity and overly sexualised images and words. It’s not just being given to the young; it’s being sold. There’s no easier group to target than the young… the explosion of youth culture isn’t serving us very well.”

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When we meet at her flat in west London — for someone who must live out of a suitcase, it’s wonderfully uncluttered in a clean, light, modern way — she hasn’t, as I expected, been practising for hours. “I didn’t practise today or yesterday,” she says. But doesn’t she play for fun, to unwind, the way the rest of us might read a book? “No,” she says emphatically. “Never to unwind.” So, what is her approach to playing the violin if it’s not for pleasure? She thinks for a bit — and when she thinks she fiddles with her long hair — and then says tentatively, “It’s a bit like trying to define what you do for your child, without even being conscious what that is.”

And she means that as a positive. When I ask if she’d like to have children, her face lights up. “Very much”, she says. A putative spouse would, however, have to inhabit her world — someone who works nine-to-five, she says, “would freak me out a bit”.

Her own childhood was, to put it mildly, unusual. Her family — Italian-Scottish — was musical in an undeveloped, singing-round-the-piano sort of way, but she and her sister started Suzuki violin lessons early on. At 10, she was whisked away to the Yehudi Menuhin School for musical prodigies, which is the equivalent of getting selected for Hogwarts, and about as removed from normal life. Early on, she was due to have lessons with the great man Yehudi Menuhin himself, but he died just before it could happen — “A great regret”, she says. She goes back to Scotland and hasn’t lost her accent, but home, she says, is London: “It’s where I live.”

What does she think about the place of women in the world of classical music — and the issue of positive discrimination, such as the Proms director’s decision that half of all new commissions will go to women by 2022? “Where there’s been huge inequality, it can be helpful”, she says. Would she mind if she were engaged for a performance as a way of making up a female quota of performers? She looks surprised. “With strings, there isn’t a problem about equal representation.”

So, as a way of discounting the notion that she’s a star because of her beauty as well as her musicianship, maybe it would be better if we just heard her on recordings rather than in person? She shakes her head vigorously. “It’s about the totality of what someone brings … their presence,” she says. “I don’t relegate that to something superficial. How someone looks is part of how she is. Music is about attacking all our senses at once … but people who are brought on to be a beautiful thing on stage, they’re not filling concert halls.”

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Her mission right now is education. “I don’t know any teacher, any parent, who doesn’t feel that children are being tested to hell and back, but for what?” she says. She wants music to be central to the curriculum but only if it’s properly taught. That means including polyphony, harmony, intervals — the kind of concepts we teach children, say, in maths, but somehow don’t with something like music.

“Learning,” she says emphatically, “is never just going to be fun.” And for her that means focusing on the fundamentals — “children’s physicality, imagination”, that sort of thing. “I’d almost rather they played Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, addressing these issues, than trying to be more proficient.”

She isn’t under any illusions that every child can be a violinist, but general musicianship is another matter: that, for most children, means choral singing. She buys into the research that singing in a choir has all manner of knock-on benefits for social skills and other subjects: “that’s a given”, she says.

She’s on a mission to change what and how children are taught in schools. Would she like to go straight to the top, to persuade Boris Johnson of the case, then? “Yes!” she says. Given her brilliance, eloquence and beauty, I think he might be more than happy to listen.

For details of how to take part in Benedetti Foundation sessions see benedettifoundation.org